My personal story with Clinical Neuropsychiatry dates back to about twenty years when I received a telephone call from an unknown Giovanni Fioriti who qualified himself as a colleague and a scientific publisher in Rome. He told me that he had in mind an ambitious project that strongly stimulated my curiosity, and that became clearer when we met thereafter. The project was centered on the possibility of a synergic collaboration devoted to the birth and launch of a scientific journal named Clinical Neuropsychiatry just in the neuropsychiatry domain published by Giovanni Fioriti together with other five editors. The prerequisite was that the journal had not to be sponsored by anybody, had to be open to all alternative explanations with no prejudice against any personal opinion, while considering only the scientific quality of the submissions, with its specific aims to carefully evaluate available therapeutic strategies in psychiatry and neurology.
Throughout the years I became Editor-in-chief, with the assistance of Giovanni Fioriti, Giulia Zanatta, our secretary, and the editorial board of colleagues who contributed both in publishing and in the review processes. As the submissions constantly increased, it became necessary to add an associate editor mainly dealing with the psychological domains, namely Prof. Adriano Schimmenti who soon became and constitutes a fundamental “tile” of the journal. Further, we felt that the introduction to the content of the papers published in each issue might be of help to the readership and, therefore, we have now the section called “article highlights” that Dr. Federico Mucci perfectly handles.
All these constant adjustements and changes along the road are clear cues of the vitality and enthusiasm of all the staff of Clinical Neuropsychiatry to improve and grow year after year to finally reach the inclusion in the Pubmed system in 2019. Now the journal has reached the 2022 Scopus CiteScore of 9.0 and the 2023 CiteScore tracker of 11.3 (Last updated of December 5, 2023) and, as such, it results the Italian journal with the highest score: the great challenge was achieved!
Let me add now some personal considerations. In the last decades of the past millennium, we witnessed an intensive development of psychotropic drugs and neuroscientific research, supported by government and industrial grants, while nurturing the notion that we could manage (and, according to the most optimistic colleagues, even to resolve) almost all neuropsychiatric conditions. However, after a few decades, its was evident that the rate of resistance was high and that the patients still had to pay a cost in terms of quality of life and side effects albeit they are more tolerable than those of the first drugs. Clinical Neuropsychiatry was born in this atmosphere of reflections and increasing awareness of the limits of available therapeutic strategies about twenty years ago with the aim and successful achievement to be a scientific journal of high-level contributions and debates. Indeed, a lot of unresolved questions remain at issue in neuropsychiatry. What are the biological targets of psychotropic drugs and psychotherapy? What are the real clinical effects of psychotropic drugs and psychotherapy? Do they act on symptoms/dimensions, or what, given that they seem unable to work according to current diagnostic systems? With no doubt, it is evident that the clinical reality is so heterogeneous to perfectly fit into rigid and almost theoretical categories. Obviously, a scientific journal reflects authors’ explanation and opinion, but cannot neglect what happens in the surrounding environment. I am eager to underline that we were one of the first journals to publish papers on problematic Internet use, on terrorism, on space exploration, on ecology, and the first journal to devote a special issue to COVID 19-pandemic in the April 2020 and another one focused on its aftermath three yeas later in April 2023. All these papers and issues clearly testify that a modern approach to neuropsychiatry should always maintain a constant focus and attention to the challenges deriving from instable world and environment that may create hitherto novel challenges and problems to psychiatrists and psychologists requiring novel coping and/or treatment strategies.
I am happy of all these achievement and I am grateful to Giovanni Fioriti, who is now one of my closest friends, as he chose me for his original project. I take this occasion to express my warmest thanks to him. However, I think that it is time to me to leave “our creature” that is quite mature to walk without me, to somebody else that with no doubt will contribute significantly to its further growth. Therefore, it is a honor for me to announce that, from January 2024, there will a two co-Editors-In-Chief, with the entry of Prof. Alfonso Troisi who will handle the psychiatry domain, together with Prof. Adriano Schimmenti.
I am sure, the readers understood that this editorial is my farewell letter to Clinical Neuropsychiatry, where I remain as founding editor, given my next role in another journal. However, I must say the truth: my devotion to Clinical Neuropsychiatry will be always the same, as I invested a lot of my energy in it, but I received and learnt more that I gave.